which_chick | (no subject)

Because my mother does not understand posting, here is more than anyone else wants to know about the subject.

Posting is the up-and-down thing that people riding in an English (hunt-seat) saddle do when their horse is trotting. I'd link to a video, but mom only has dialup and won't go look at it, so there is no point.

People who ride dressage do not (mostly) post. People who ride gaited, non-trotting horses do not post. Posting is for normal people riding in everyday English saddles (not the kind for cowboys, for roping steers, for barrel-racing) with their horse at the trot.

What is the trot? The trot is the two-beat, diagonal gait that horses do in between "walk" and "canter". You don't see a hell of a lot of it in the movies because movie horses only canter, especially if it's a cowboy movie. In the real world, though, riders and horses trot rather a lot of the time. It's a good working gait.

At the trot, the left hind and right front leg move together. The right hind and left front leg move together. If you think about this, it's pretty-much the DIAGONAL PAIRS OF LEGS that are working. (Front-right, hind-left) vs. (Front-left, hind-right), kind of the DIAGONAL CORNERS OF THE HORSE, see, if you go for the "leg at each corner" depiction of a horse. People who do not have a horse handy to look at might be able to get a really good idea of what the trot looks like by, for example, examining the trot of their miniature schnauzer, for it is the same as the trot of the horse, only smaller and smelling like dog.

Now, when posting, the rider goes up-down-up-down-up-down when the horse alternates strides of the diagonal pairs of legs. The rider has to be in rhythm with the horse for this to really work because the "up" part happens when the horse steps off into the air on one of the diagonals. See, the trot is kind of a bouncy thing most of the time and the horse is suspended in mid air between each diagonal pair of legs hitting the ground, as was first proved for sure in a totally famous set of pictures by Edweard Muybridge, who settled the issue once and for all that they never stood on ground, their speed was so amazin'. :)

Anyway. A "diagonal" when trotting refers to when the rider is rising. If the rider is riding on a circle to the LEFT, she rises up when the RIGHT FRONT leg is coming forward. If the rider is riding on a circle to the RIGHT, she rises when the LEFT FRONT leg is coming forward. The rhyme for n00bs is "Rise and fall with the outside wall". You are not supposed to look at the legs to find the diagonal you are on. You are supposed to be able to tell this by feel. I can't tell-by-feel, lacking entirely the sort of macro body-awareness that makes people good kinesthetic learners. That's why I was working on it at pony lady last week.

More information about diagonals and posting the trot with horses is here.